I'm going to need a team of Templars ready to mobilise, street level maps of all of Denerim, a pot of coffee, twelve Jammie Dodgers and a fez

It seems like every one and their dog are writing about skills in D&D since Monte Cook started talking about them in his new Legends and Law column at the WotC web site. There's been lots of talk on twitter about it too. If you want to know people's thoughts on the future of D&D skills then some of the blogs I link to on the right are likely to have a thing or two to say about it. All the chatter has made me pretty much shut off from talk about the future of D&D, I'm way past the point where the speculation is interesting and I want to look to different things until it all blows over (luckily it's Play a New RPG Month soon so it's easy to do that). However it has got me thinking about skill systems in other games and how I feel about them. So I'm going to talk a little about one of them and see how they compare. read on...

I mentioned a while ago that I was thinking of putting together a session of Traveller based on the old Dungeons & Dragons module Tomb of Horrors. I thought that it would be fun to mix it up a bit and do a sci-fi dungeon crawl, and it was. Now this post will contain a few spoilers for anyone who isn't familiar with the Tomb of Horrors should be wary. It is available updated to 3rd and 4th Edition D&D so you might find yourself playing it one day.

To convert the module I had a look through and decided that I only wanted to use the first half of the Tomb. There were a few reasons for this. The first was that I only wanted this adventure to last one evening. These guys are space farers, they don't want to be stuck in a dark underground ancient tomb for very long without good reason. The second was that Traveller characters are fairly squishy and the traps and combats become pretty deadly in the second half of the Tomb of Horrors. You can't just find a cleric that's willing to raise your dead crew mates. They are dead and it's back to character creation and a session to introduce the new character into the story.

Next I had a think about how to handle the magic. This is science fiction, there is no magic unless you include psionics so everything had to be technological. This limited some things and a few had to go. I kept one of the teleporters though. The fact that there isn't any teleportation technology in my galaxy made this significant. read on...